Jamie Pittock is a researcher at the Australian National University and a leading authority on dams.
"You can either build a dam to store water for use, but if the dam is full of stored water it can't catch a flood. If you want to build a dam to catch a flood you have to keep that dam empty and then that doesn't store water. You can't have it both ways."
"Many of the dams we have built are actually proven to be mistakes; they're too shallow, they evaporate too much water and in fact we are starting to pull down some dams just this past year. The Victorian Government has been decommissioning Lake Mokoan - a water storage near Benalla because it loses too much water."
